It’s worth reading A Fortunate Man as half of a diptych, followed by this new book, A Fortunate Woman, immediately afterwards. The latter came about through a perfect alignment of coincidences. The author, Polly Morland, is a journalist and film-maker with a kindly, dramatic writing style and a feel for the human story. In 2020 she was clearing her mother’s house, after her mother, suffering from Alzheimer’s, had been moved into a care home. It followed, she writes, a “frightening and chaotic” year of “doctors and paramedics, nurses and social workers”. They had all been “well meaning and professional”, but none had known her mother “before all this started, nor stayed long enough to get to know her now”. This book was inspired by the discovery of a long-lost book in the bookcase of the author’s mother—John Berger’s A Fortunate Man—which was itself the story of a country doctor published in the 1960s. In a series of coincidences, unbeknown to her, author Polly Morland found that she was living in the same remote valley that was the setting for A Fortunate Man. In turn she spoke to the current doctor of the valley who said that Berger’s book had been a big influence on her own choices to become a doctor. Author and doctor began to meet and talk, and the idea for a parallel book, set in modern times, came about. In this rare rural setting the doctor knows her patients well and provides a system of continual care in their community. For me, this story is so much better than John Bergers’s book about a single handed doctor working in the same practice forty years ago. This was “Dr John Sassall”. How capable he was, how eccentric, how dedicated and how unlikely, nowadays, was revealed in John Berger’s classic 1967 book A Fortunate Man. Sassall was a friend and Berger shadowed him for some months, along with the Swiss photographer Jean Mohr. The subtitle of their collaboration is The Story of a Country Doctor. It is not a story as such; it proceeds through a series of vignettes, psychological explorations, case studies and in-depth enquiries into the relationship between one man and his calling, his patients and his environment. Beautifully written, beguiling, important, overlaid with kindness, quietly woven with a sense of place and a profound insight into how rural communities function. I loved this book. Robert Penn, author of Slow Rise& The Man Who Made Things Out of Trees

A Fortunate Woman by Polly Morland, Richard Baker - Waterstones

At the college’s threescore and 10, outgoing president Martin Marshall offers a sobering assessment of how the profession is bearing up. “There has to come a point,” Marshall says, “where doctors decide, I can’t do my job any more, and then the situation will spiral out of control. I would use the term crisis: so many parts of the NHS are under such enormous pressure that they are unable to provide the personal care that patients need, unable to provide effective care, and increasingly unable to even provide safe care.” Listening has become even more crucial. Ten-minute appointments are bad enough. Covid meant doing that behind a mask and face-visor, in scrubs made of old duvet covers. Now there is the telephone consultation. In the before-times, the doctor made a point of accompanying a patient from waiting room to consulting room, because it gave her a chance to assess their mobility and demeanour. Now there is the phone. The doctor has become adept at reading a voice, its hesitancies, emotions, evasions; 16 calls in a morning is the norm. This is a story of coincidence and serendipity, of a career in front line healthcare when the NHS itself was brought to its knees and of the relationship based medicine that might have made a difference to my Mum, had it been available to her.

That’s one of the reasons there are so few takers. When Hodges got his first salaried GP job there were 50 applicants. Today, all the local GPs I speak to insist that you could pretty much walk into any practice in the county and be hired on the spot. Not surprisingly, young doctors often prefer a few days a week as a contracted locum without the pressure of also being responsible – as here – for the management and livelihoods of 140 staff. The result is a kind of perfect storm of stress on the traditional partnership model – a recent Royal College of General Practitioners survey found that 42% of GPs in England were “likely or very likely to leave the profession in the next five years”, with nearly half of those suggesting burnout or stress as the prime reason.

A Fortunate Woman review: John Berger’s classic upated - New

This beautifully crafted book drew me in immediately by reminding me of so many reasons why I became a general practitioner in the first place…a compelling narrative based on patient stories. I loved it. Professor Dame Helen Stokes-Lampard Christina Patterson, Sunday Times The doctor's kindly, hollistic approach - she makes time to investigate her patients' social as well as physical needs - seems to evoke a lost world . . . Morland's book contains a profound message for the future at a critical moment for general practice and us all. I only realised that Polly Morland wrote ‘The Society of Timid Souls’ which I absolutely loved when I got the Fortunate Woman home. It was one of the few books that made it to my new book shelves when I moved house. Her second book is no less compelling or beautiful. A Fortunate Woman is a portrait of a dedicated GP who has been rooted in her village community for decades. She’s the successor to a more eccentric doctor who’s life was detailed in another book written decades ago called ‘A fortunate man’ It’s makes the case for continuity of care, the quiet joy of community and how neighbourliness enriches our lives. Vivid case studies of the patients and residents in the community are interspersed among beautiful and poignant nature writing. This biography is as much about person and place as it is about the transformation of family medicine from the human connections of a country doctor to a monolithic public service focused on efficiencies, fiscal accountability, and key performance indicators. It's a story that mirrors a similar transformation of society at large. As a member of the community she serves, the Fortunate Doctor knows her patients as more than just reporting data, but as human beings, and all the complexities and baggage that that involves—as did the doctor who served in this place before her. Part of this is the breakdown in secondary care. Christmas estimates that at least 20% of her workload is managing patients on interminable waiting lists. And it is a long time since she called an ambulance. “That’s not really functioning, so we usually have to drive patients to hospital.” Once there they are facing 12- and 14-hour waits in A&E. “Quite often at the moment,” she says, “I’ll turn up to work at half seven, and there’ll be a patient in the car park who has given up on the emergency department, and is waiting to bang on my door.”If the title seems familiar to you, it is because it is inspired by the book A Fortunate Man. Written by John Berger this book blended text and photographs to tell the story of a country GP named John Sassall working in the same valley in the Forest of Dean in the 1960s. Long considered a medical classic, students and trainees have been encouraged to read it ever since and it is said to have inspired many doctors into General Practice, including the GP in A Fortunate Woman. Guilty confession: I didn’t like it. Sassall’s evolution in the book from a narrow-minded surgeon intolerant of minor complaints to holistic, patient-centred GP is revealing but I found the prose dense, the philosophical allusions opaque and Sassall as a character obsessive, dogmatic and at times unlikeable. Insightful, moving … instructive when so many practices are in crisis. A Times Audiobook of the Year 2022

A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story - Goodreads A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story - Goodreads

This is a contemporary look at a rural practitioner, who serves the same Gloucestershire community as the Fortunate Man of Berger's classic, but so much more emotive and visceral. She, as her predecessor (bar one), embeds herself in the community she serves and shows rather than tells the huge benefits for both patient and clinician of this cross-pollination for their health. I thought this book was brilliant. In all honesty, I assumed when I first saw the title that it was a straightforward memoir by a country GP, written by her, the usual run of the mill type stuff. Little did I know it was linked to a previous book A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor, and the GP practice in Morland's title is the same one as featured in that book. Most of us over the age of 30 can remember the family doctor we had when we were kids. They met us as babies and watched us grow up. They knew our stories, those of our siblings, our parents and often our grandparents, too. These stories were fundamental to the bond of trust between doctors and their patients. We are now learning that this deep, accumulated knowledge was also palpably beneficial in medical terms. I laughed out loud at several scenes, and wiped away tears at others; this evoked human drama and life’s ebbs and flow in all its complexity, bound up by a love for the wild surroundings of the valley practice, haunted and inspired by the original book (and GP) on which this is based: “A Fortunate Man.”I was consoled and compelled by this book’s steady gaze on healing and caring. The writing is beautiful' - Sarah Moss, author of Summerwater and Ghost Wall Last week, I went to Gloucester to see a doctor. I was armed with headlines that placed the city and its surrounding county at the sharpest end of the current crisis in general practice. More than 30,000 patients in Gloucestershire had to wait more than a month for a GP appointment in September, a figure that had doubled in a year. Meanwhile, since the pandemic, doctors and nurses and reception staff have been leaving jobs and partnerships in unprecedented numbers. (There is a current shortfall of at least 4,200 GPs across England, with notable gaps in the south-west.)